ALONE IN WEST AFRICA
By Mary Gaunt
Author Of “The Uncounted Cost,” Etc.
Charles Scribner's Sons London: T. Werner Laurie
1911
DEDICATION
To those who have helped me I dedicate this record of my travels in West
Africa. Without their help I could have done nothing; it was always most
graciously and kindly given and I know not how to show my appreciation
of it. “Evermore thanks, the exchequer of the poor,” is all I can give
in return, unless some of them will take this book in very inadequate
payment. Sir Charles Lucas, the head of the Colonial Office, gave me
letters of introduction, Elder Dempster and Co. gave me a free passage,
their captains and their officers put themselves out to help me, Sir
George Denton welcomed me to West Africa, and after these comes a long
string of people who each and all contributed so much to my welfare that
I feel myself ungracious not to mention them all by name. I must thank
Messrs Swanzy and Co., who helped me up the Volta and across the unknown
country on the German border, and I were churl indeed if I did not
remember those men and women of another nation, who received me out of
the unknown, fed me, welcomed me, and smoothed my way for me. To each
and all then, with this dedication, I offer my most grateful thanks.
ALONE IN WEST AFRICA
CHAPTER I--SONS OF THE SEA WIFE
_Hereditary taste for wandering--A first adventure--“Little girls
you must not be tired”--How Carlo was captured by savages in
West Africa--Life in Ballarat--Nothing for a woman to do but
marry--Marriage--Plans for wandering twenty years hence--Life in
Warrnambool--Widowhood--May as well travel now there is nothing
left--London for an aspirant in literature--Stony streets and drizzling
rain--Scanty purse--Visit to the home of a rich African trader--Small
successes--At last, at last on board s.s. Gando bound for the Gambia._
“There dwells a wife by the Northern Gate,
And a wealthy wife is she;
She breeds a breed o' rovin' men,
And casts them over sea.”
Sometimes when people ask me with wonder why I went to West Africa, why
I wanted to go, I feel as if that wife must have grown old and feeble
and will bear no more men to send across the sea. I hope not. I trust
not. More than ninety years ago she sent my mother's father into the
Honourable East India Co.'s service, and then, in later years with his
ten children to colonise Van Diemen's Land. Nearly sixty years ago she
sent my father, a slim young lad, out to the goldfields in Australia,
and she breathed her spirit over the five boys and two girls who grew
up in the new land. I cannot remember when any one of us would not have
gone anywhere in the world at a moment's notice. It would not have been
any good pointing out the dangers, because dangers at a distance are
only an incentive. There is something in the thought of danger that must
be overcome, that you yourself can help to overcome, that quickens the
blood and gives an added zest to life.
I can remember as a small girl going with my sister to stay with an
uncle who had a station, Mannerim, behind Geelong. The house had been
built in the old days of slabs with a bark roof, very inflammable
material. I loved the place then because it spoke of the strenuous old
days of the Colony. I love the memory of it now for old times' sake, and
because there happened the first really exciting incident in my life.
It was a January morning, the sky overcast with smoke and a furious
hot wind blowing from the north. The men of the household looked out
anxiously, but I sat and read a story-book. It was the tale of a boy
named Carlo who was wrecked on the coast of West Africa--nice vague
location; he climbed a cocoa-nut tree--I can see him now with a rope
round his waist and his legs dangling in an impossible attitude--and he
was taken by savages. His further adventures I do not know, because
a man came riding in shouting that the calf paddock was on fire and
everyone must turn out. Everyone did turn out except my aunt who stayed
behind to prepare cool drinks, and those drinks my little sister and I,
as being useless for beating out the flames, were sent to carry to the
workers in jugs and “billies.”
“Now little girls,” said my aunt who was tenderness and kindness itself,
“remember you are not to get tired.”
It was the first lesson I really remember in the stern realities of
life. We had hailed the bushfire as something new and exciting; now we
were to be taught that much excitement brings its strenuous hard labour.
The fire did not reach the house, and the men and women got their drink,
but it was two very weary, dirty, smoke-grimed and triumphant little
girls who bathed and went to bed that night. I never finished the
story of Carlo. Where he went to I can't imagine, but I can't think the
savages ate him else his story would never have been written; and from
that moment dated my deep interest in West Africa.
We grew up and the boys of the family went a-roving to other lands. One
was a soldier, two were sailors, and the two youngest were going to be
lawyers, whereby they might make money and go to the other ends of the
world if they liked. When we were young we generally regarded money as a
means of locomotion. We have hardly got over the habit yet. Only for us
two girls was there no prospect. Our world was bounded by our father's
lawns and the young men who came to see us and made up picnic parties to
the wildest bush round Ballarat for our amusement. It was not bad. Even
now I acknowledge to something of delight to be found in a box-seat of a
four-in-hand, a glorious moonlight night, and four horses going at full
speed; something delightful in scrambles over the ranges and a luncheon
in the shade by a waterhole, with romantic stories for a seasoning, and
the right man with a certain admiration in his eyes to listen. It was
not bad, but it was not as good a life as the boys of the family were
having, and it was giving me no chance of visiting the land Carlo had
gone to that had been in my mind at intervals ever since the days of my
childish bushfire.
There was really nothing for a woman but to marry, and accordingly we
both married and I forgot in my entrance into that world, which is so
old and yet always so new, my vague longings after savage lands.
I wonder sometimes would I have been contented to lead the ordinary
woman's life, the life of the woman who looks after her husband and
children. I think so, because it grew to be the life I ardently yearned
for. The wander desire was just pushed a little into the back-ground
and was to come off twenty years hence when we had made our fortune. And
twenty years looked such a long long while then. It even looks a long
time now, for it has not passed, and I seem to have lived a hundred
years and many lives since the days in the little Victorian town of
Warrnambool when my handsome young husband and I planned out our future
life. But I was nearer to Carlo's land than I thought even then, and
if I could have peeped into the future I would only have shrunk with
unspeakable dread from the path I must walk, the path that was to lead
me to the consummation of my childish hopes. In a very few years the
home life I had entered into with such gladness was over, my husband was
dead, and I was penniless, homeless, and alone. Of course I might have
gone back to my father's house, my parents would have welcomed me,
but can any woman go back and take a subordinate position when she has
ruled? I think not; besides it would only have been putting off the evil
day. When my father died, and in the course of nature he must die before
me, there would be but a pittance, and I should have to start out once
more handicapped with the added years. Again, and I think this thought
was latent beneath all the misery and hopelessness that made me say I
did not care what became of me, was I not free, free to wander where I
pleased, to seek those adventures that had held such a glamour for me
in my girlhood. True, I had not much money with which to seek them. When
everything was settled up I found if I stayed quietly in Australia I had
exactly thirty pounds a year to call my own. Thirty pounds a year, and I
reckoned I could make perhaps fifty pounds by my pen. My mother pointed
out to me that if I lived with my parents it would not be so bad. But it
was not to be thought of for a moment. The chance had come, through
seas of trouble, but still it had come, and I would go and see the
great world for myself. I thought I had lived my life, that no sorrow
or gladness could ever touch me keenly again; but I knew, it was in my
blood, that I should like to see strange places and visit unknown lands.
But on thirty pounds a year one can do nothing, so I took a hundred
pounds out of my capital and came to London determined to make money by
my pen in the heart of the world.
Oh, the hopes of the aspirant for literary fame, and oh, the dreariness
and the weariness of life for a woman poor and unknown in London! I
lodged in two rooms in a dull and stony street. I had no one to speak to
from morning to night, and I wrote and wrote and wrote stories that all
came back to me, and I am bound to say the editors who sent them back
were quite right. They were poor stuff, but how could anyone do good
work who was sick and miserable, cold and lonely, with all the life
crushed out of her by the grey skies and the drizzling rain? I found
London a terrible place in those days; I longed with all my heart for
my own country, my own little home in Warrnambool where the sun shone
always, the roses yellow and pink climbed over the wall, the white
pittosporum blossoms filled the air with their fragrance, and the great
trees stood up tall and straight against the dark-blue sky. I did not go
back to my father, because my pride would not allow me to own myself a
failure and because all the traditions of my family were against giving
in. But I was very near it, very near it indeed.
Then after six months of hopelessness there came to see me from
Liverpool a friend of one of my sailor brothers, and she, good
Samaritan, suggested I should spend my Christmas with her.
I went. She and her daughters were rich people and the husband and
father had been an African trader. So here it was again presented to me,
the land to which I had resolved to go when I was a little child, and
everything in the house spoke to me of it. In the garden under a cedar
tree was the great figurehead of an old sailing ship; in the corridor
upstairs was the model of a factory, trees, boats, people, houses all
complete; in the rooms were pictures of the rivers and swamps and the
hulks where trade was carried on. To their owners these possessions were
familiar as household words that meant nothing; to me they reopened a
new world of desire or rather an old desire in a new setting--the vague
was taking concrete form. I determined quite definitely that I would go
to West Africa. The thing that amazed me was that everybody with money
in their pockets was not equally desirous of going there.
About this time, too, I discovered that it was simply hopeless for me to
think of writing stories about English life. The regular, conventional
life did not appeal to me; I could only write adventure stories, and the
scene of adventure stories was best laid in savage lands. West Africa
was not at all a bad place in which to set them. Its savagery called
me. There and then I started to write stories about it. Looking back, I
smile when I think of the difficulties that lay in my path. Even after
I had carefully read every book of travel I could lay my hands on, I
was still in deepest ignorance, because every traveller left so much
undescribed and told nothing of the thousand and one little trifles
that make ignorant eyes see the life that is so different from that in a
civilised land. But if you will only look for a thing it is astonishing
how you will find it often in the most unlikely places; if you set your
heart on something it is astonishing how often you will get your heart's
desire. I sought for information about West Africa and I found it, not
easily; every story I wrote cost me a world of trouble and research and
anxiety, and I fear me the friends I was beginning to make a world of
trouble too. But they were kind and long-suffering; this man gave me
a little information here, that one there, and I can laugh now when
I think of the scenes that had to be written and rewritten before a
hammock could be taken a couple of miles, before a man could sit down to
his early-morning tea in the bush. It took years to do it, but at last
it was done to some purpose; the book I had written with great effort
caught on, and I had the money for the trip I had planned many years
before when I was a small girl reading about those distant lands. I
hesitated not a moment. The day I had sufficient money to make such
a thing possible I went up to the City to see about a passage to West
Africa.
And now a wonderful thing happened. Such a piece of good luck as I had
not in my wildest dreams contemplated. Elder Dempster, instigated by the
kind offices of Sir Charles Lucas, the permanent head of the Colonial
Office, who knew how keen was my desire, offered me a ticket along the
Coast, so that I actually had all the money I had earned to put into
land travel, and Mr Laurie, my publisher, fired by my enthusiasm,
commissioned a book about the wonderful old forts that I knew lay
neglected and crumbling to decay all along the shores of the Gold Coast.
As I look back it seems as if surely the fairy godmother who had omitted
to take my youth in charge was now showering me with good gifts, or
maybe, most probably, the good gifts had been offered all along and I
had never recognised them. We, some of us, drive in a gorgeous coach and
never see anything but the pumpkin.
At least I was not making that mistake now. I was wild with delight and
excitement when, on a cold November day, when London was wrapped in
fog, I started from Euston for Liverpool. One of the brothers who I had
envied in my youth, a post captain in the Navy now (how the years fly),
happened to be in London and came down to the station to see me and my
heaped impedimenta off.
He understood my delight in the realisation of my dream.
“Have you any directions for the disposal of your remains?” he asked
chaffingly, as we groped our way through the London fog.
“Oh, that will all be settled,” said I, “long before you hear anything
about it”; and we both laughed. We did not think, either of us, my
adventure was going to end disastrously. It would have been against all
the traditions of the family to think any such thing.
He told me how once he had gone into action with interest because he
wanted to see what it would be like to be under fire, and whether
he would be frightened. He didn't have much time to contemplate the
situation, for presently he was so badly wounded that it took him six
months to crawl off his bed, but it brought him a cross of honour from
Italy. “And now,” says he, with a certain satisfaction, “I know.” So
he sympathised. He felt that whatever happened I would have the
satisfaction of knowing.
It is hardly necessary to describe to an English reader Liverpool on
a cold, grey morning in November. There is the grey sky and the grey
streets and the grey houses, and the well-to-do shivering in their
wraps, and the poor shivering in their rags, all the colourless English
world, that is not really colourless for those who know how to look at
it, but which had driven me to sunnier lands; and there was the ship
with her wet decks, her busy officers in comforters and sea-boots, her
bare-footed sailors, and her gangways crowded with cargo, baggage, and
numbers of bewildered passengers themselves.
And I think as we crowded into the smoking-room for warmth I was the
only enthusiastic person among them. The majority of the passengers on
board s.s. _Gando_ actually didn't want to go to West Africa.
It seems strange, but so it was; the greater part of them, if they
could have afforded to stay at home, would actually have stayed. I was
inclined to be impatient with them. Now I forgive them. They know not
what they do. It is a pity, but it can be remedied.
The _Gando_ was not a mail boat. I had chosen her because she called
at Dakar, and I thought I would like to go if possible to the first
settlement on the Coast, and I wanted to see how the French did things.
I may say here I never got to Dakar--still it is something to be looked
forward to in the future, to be done when next I write a book that
pays--for on board the _Gando_ was Sir George Denton, the Governor of
the Gambia, surely the nicest governor ever lucky colony had, and for
such an important person the ship went a little out of her way and
called first at Bathurst, port and capital of the Gambia colony.
Now, I had a letter of introduction to Sir George and I presented it,
and he promptly asked me to come ashore with him. I had never thought
of staying in the Gambia beyond the day or two the ship would take to
discharge her cargo--“a potty little colony,” as I had heard it called,
and it hardly seemed worth while to waste my time in a miniature Thames.
How the Governor laughed when he found out my appalling ignorance, and
how ashamed I was when I found it out!
“The Thames,” said he; “well, we only hold the mouth of the river about
four hundred miles up, but the Gambia is at least a thousand miles in
extent, and may be longer for all I know.”
I apologised to the Gambia.
“But could I see the river?”
“Why, of course; we'll send you up in the _Mansikillah_, the Government
steamer”; and I accepted his invitation with alacrity and with
gratitude.
Truly, my fairy godmother was more than waving her wand. I hadn't left
English shores a week, and here was an invitation to go four hundred
miles into the interior of the continent of my dreams.
We went first to the Canary Islands, the islands of the blest of
the ancients, but the Canaries were as nothing to me; they have been
civilised too long. They were only a stepping-stone to that other land,
the land of romance, that I was nearing at last.
And now I have an apology to make, an apology which very few people
will understand, but those few will, and to them it is a matter of such
importance that I must make it. I went to see a savage land. I went to
seek material for the only sort of story I can write, and to tell of the
prowess of the men who had gone before and left their traces in great
stone forts all along three hundred miles of coast. I found a savage
land, in some parts a very wild land indeed, but I found what I had
never expected, a land of immense possibilities, a land overflowing with
wealth, a land of corn and wine and oil. I expected swamp and miasma,
heat, fever, and mosquitoes. I found these truly, but I found, too, a
lovely land, an entrancingly lovely land in places; I found gorgeous
nights and divine mornings, and I found that the great interest of West
Africa lay not in the opportunity it gave for vivid descriptions of
heroes who fought and suffered and conquered, or fought and suffered
and died, but in showing its immense value to the English crown in
describing a land where every tropical product may be grown, a land with
a teeming population and a generous soil, a land in fact that, properly
managed, should supply raw material for half the workshops in England,
a land that may be made to give some of its sunlight to keep alight the
fires on English hearths in December, a land that as yet only the wiser
heads amongst us realise the value of.
“A man comes to West Africa,” said a Swiss to me once, “because he can
make in ten years as much as he could make in thirty in England.”
That is the land I found, and I apologise if I have ever written or
thought of it in any other way.
“The White Man's Grave,” say many still. But even the all-powerful white
man must have a grave in the end. Live wisely and discreetly and it is,
I think with wise old Zachary Macauley who ruled Sierra Leone at the end
of the eighteenth century, no more likely to be in West Africa than in
any other place.
And the ship sailed on, and one morning early, before daylight, we heard
the bell buoy that marks the mouth of the Gambia before lazy eyes can
see there is a river, and knew that we had arrived at our destination.
At last, at last I was on the very threshold of the land I had dreamed
of years before.